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The Appropriate Tune: "Scheherazade", by the Vienna Philharmonic
With cinema, as with many things, we sometimes find ourselves occupied with thoughts of what could have been. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune is perhaps the most well known, but I’d venture to say that much of its popularity lies in it being supremely unfilmable. A 24 hour runtime? A cast that included Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali (before he went fascist)? Art direction by a young H.R. Giger? What a trip that would’ve been! What’s less fun, however, is those films that were being worked on, did show promise, but all of a sudden...stopped. Maybe it was money troubles, or troubles with the cast and crew, or studio interference, but whatever the reason the movie just does not see the light of day. Or if it does, because movie studios are as obsessed with money as they are with fucking up the things that make them money, it’s ultimately released as a shadow of its former self.
We’ve covered one such case on the Marathon before in Lost Soul, the documentary of up-and-coming director Richard Stanley’s ambitious adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau which eventually limped into theaters as a John Frankenheimer directed trainwreck. Yet all the heartache and pain that surrounding that production almost seems like a drop in the bucket compared to that of The Thief and the Cobbler. That whole thing took place over a year or two; Director, co-writer and animator Richard Williams (who you might recognize as the animation director for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) began work on the film in 1964, and then spent the next 30 years of his life trying to put it together, funding it out of his own pocket and through whatever investors he was able to find. In the early 90s, after a deal with Warner Bros. fell apart, Williams was forced off of the film by the new rights holder The Completion Bond Company, who hired Fred Calvert to put a bullet in its brain, which in industry terms meant filling in the cracks with cheap animation done by freelancers and Disney style musical numbers. The distribution rights of that new film, known as The Princess and the Cobbler, were then sold to Miramax, where noted rapist Harvey Weinstein had the film cut again into Arabian Knight, which in the theaters went over about as well as farting in your girlfriend’s face when she’s trying to tell you she’s pregnant. Although it doesn’t seem like he was the easiest guy to work with in the world, it is a shame that Richard Williams went to his grave in 2019 having never been able to see his life’s work come to fruition. Which got me curious to check it out for myself.
As I said, The Thief and the Cobbler was never actually made into a movie.. A workprint was made around 1992, which is where the material for Princess and the Cobbler and Arabian Knight came from, but many scenes had yet to be animated and overall it was not in a state fit to be called a movie. Because of that, and because I had no interest in covering those other films, I decided instead to take a look at the ‘Recobbled Cut’, a project headed by Garrett Gilchrist which seeks to take as much of what was The Thief and the Cobbler as possible, the completed animation, animatics, still pictures and what have you, and fashion it into a workable narrative. It’s not a perfect solution obviously, a good portion of this animated movie isn’t even animated, but as far as I know it’s as close to Richard Williams’ original vision as we’re going to get. Recobbled Cut Mark 4 I believe is what it goes under, shouldn’t be all that hard to find. Now let’s get into it.
In a world that is not unlike a dream, there is a golden land. In that land is a magnificent golden city, and in that city is a tall golden minaret, and at the very top of that minaret there are three golden balls. Legend goes that as long as those balls are on the minaret peace and prosperity will reign, but should they ever be removed, then death and destruction is sure to follow. However, legend also states that should this ever occur, then the simplest soul will save the day. One day, an encounter with a wily Thief ends up putting humble cobbler Tack on the shit-list of the crooked grand vizier Zigzag. Arrested and sent to the palace for punishment, Tack instead finds himself in the good graces of the beautiful Princess Yum-Yum, while the Thief catches a glimpse of the beautiful golden balls. While the two youngsters try their hand at courtship, Zigzag schemes a way to take control of the city, and the Thief plies his trade, none in the city realize the danger that looms on the horizon. One Eye, the insatiable warlord, has his sight set on ransacking the city, and he’s got about 2,000 men ready to help him do it. Disparate people with disparate aims, and yet as time goes on it seems inevitable that these paths will meet. How much stock can you put in legends? How drunk do you have to be to name your daughter Yum-Yum? And how many stories set in a fictional Middle Eastern kingdom that deals with a commoner falling in love with a princess and opposing an evil grand vizier with a bird companion whose plan involves marrying the princess against her will do we really need anyway?
As you might expect from an animated film that was worked on for 3 decades, at its best The Thief and the Cobbler is stunning. Not only is the animation as smooth as anything you’d seen in a Disney film, incorporating an eclectic range of character designs from the simple to the grotesque, but the art, matte paintings and so on, are insane. Not only is it incredibly detailed (replicating classical Persian artwork), but how it’s used is unlike anything I’ve ever seen attempted in animation before, at least in the West. There’s a scene where Tack is chasing after the Thief in this black and white section of the castle and it might be the first time I ever felt dizzy while watching a movie, because it feels like a kaleidoscope in fast forward. The Thief and the Cobbler’s sense of scale is reminiscent of Sun Wukong on the Buddha’s palm, and I can’t think of many animated films outside of Akira and Ghibli’s best that went so far so well. It also does a great job of highlighting how it never got finished; With how much work it takes to make hand drawn animation in general much less shit this good, combined with what was supposedly a haphazard working environment, I doubt there’s many studios out there that would be willing to throw down the cash to keep the lights on.
The story I could also see being an issue with money hungry studio execs, because it’s not quite your standardized Hollywood fare. The characters our film are named after are almost totally silent, and while there is technically ‘action’ most of it, in fact most of the plot is driven by the extreme and often implausible whims of fate, much in the same way as a Wile E. Coyote or Pink Panther cartoon. Which can be entertaining, combined with the sense of scale you can get some truly amazing scenes of utter chaos, but it does feel at times that the movie is focused too strictly on Thief getting into slapstick situations at the expense of character development. Who cares about who Tack is as a person? Who cares about building that relationship between Tack and Yum-Yum? No matter what anybody does the world seems set on pushing towards a conclusion so I guess it doesn’t matter, basically. Makes sense for a dark comedy like Hitchhiker’s Guide, but not for a more upbeat story like it appears Thief and the Cobbler was meant to be.
Also this is a personal thing, in this completely objective film review, but I do not agree with the choice of Sara Crowe as Princess Yum-Yum (listed as Hilary Pitchard in the credits. The rest of the cast ranges from okay to good, with the obvious highlight being Vincent Prince as Zigzag, but Yum-Yum’s voice reminds me less of a princess and more of Harley Quinn. Too high-pitched for my tastes, and since she doesn’t really get to do much in the movie she never really has time to ingratiate herself with the audience. If this were Dragon’s Lair or something where it’s full on farce it’d work, but I’m just not feeling it. I also don’t know if Bobbi Page or Jennifer Beals, the voices for the AFP and Miramax cuts respectively, were any better, I just know that this Yum-Yum wasn’t doing it for me.
Richard Williams died having never finished his most ambitious project, and we will all die having never seen it. Still, even Williams himself acknowledged that it was fan edits like these that kept the spirit of the movie alive, so I think I can give the Recobbled Cut of The Thief and the Cobbler. If you consider yourself even a casual fan of animation I think you owe it to yourself to check it out this Halloween. If not for the story it tries to tell, then in recognition of the blood, sweat and tears that Richard Williams and dozens of others shed to try and make it happen, and to what might have been.
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